Music composers are increasingly making use of libraries of audio loops. As such libraries continue to proliferate in size and type, composers would benefit from tools that can assist in identifying suitable loops for consideration in a composition. Composers might wish to consider loops that span more than one genre, and that include material that has not been classified or tagged with descriptive metadata.
However, research and development in this field has been principally directed to music recommendation systems for music listeners. Such systems typically base their recommendations on the listening patterns of a large corpus of users, primarily with the goal of recommending songs to listeners that are similar to ones that they already like, often with a view to stimulating the purchase music. One example of such a system is the Genius Bar feature from Apple Computer, Inc. Other systems use an analysis of specific musical features, as for example in the Music Genome Project of Pandora Media, Inc., in which music is categorized by hand in order to represent a piece of music as a flat “vector” of musical attributes. Each attribute is “scored” for each piece of music.